Eye-Opening Writing Tips From Great Authors

We are all people. We make mistakes and fail sometimes. So, do not think that if you are unsuccessful in your writing now, it means that you don’t have a talent.

Look into the history and you’ll see dozens of examples when the well-known writers failed to present their masterpieces to the public. Here are only a few of them:

Upon submitting Lolita, Vladimir Nabokov obtained a ruthless rejection from a publishing house. Later, millions of copies of this book were sold.
One of the publishers told J.K. Rowling that her Harry Potter series wouldn’t interest anyone. You know what happened next.
Walt Disney Productions rejected Tim Burton’s illustrated book The Giant Zlig. Now this man is considered a genius by many.
Gertrude Stein had to overcome mockery over her writing style before she became a well-known writer.
After reading Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way, a publisher recommended him to give up writing. Now, he’s considered a French classic.

We could go on enumerating similar cases. Therefore, if you get tons of criticism, mockery, and rejection, it doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer. It means that you have to keep on working on your style and listen to the advice of writers who know what they say.

Best Advice from Greatest Writers

Harper Lee advises writers to “be wise to develop a thick hide.”

Jack London once said that the writer shouldn’t wait for inspiration but search for it and run after it.

George Orwell considered writing to be “a horrible, exhausting struggle” and compared it to a painful disease. He said that one could undertake this path only if he/she was driven by a demon that couldn’t be understood or resisted.

W. Somerset Maugham was funny enough to say that there were three key principles to writing a novel. However, “no one knows what they are.”

Stephen King recommends writers to read a lot. He says that otherwise, the writer won’t have tools to write.

Anne Enright once said that to understand the value of one’s unfinished novel, one has to imagine that they have a terminal illness and see if they want to finish it before dying. If not, there is something to fix there!

William Zinsser said that writing doesn’t just seem to be hard. It is actually one of the most difficult things to do.

Joshua Wolf Shenk recommended writers to finish and check the first draft as quickly as possible. Otherwise, it might take weeks, months, and even years to polish it. “Have the courage to write badly,” he said.

Neil Gaiman advises sticking to the personal style. After all, “you are the only you.”